im pretty sure this one Is mine
Complex.
I went to work for a large aluminum can manufacturer in 1968, they had been closed for almost a year do to a union strike. Almost all of the old employees had left and we had a virgin crew trying to get the place fired back up. The large presses that stamped out the beer cans had a conveyor below them to carry off the scrap aluminum. When the conveyor would break I would often get stuck working below the machines with a pitch fork, sharp metal shavings and water soluable oil raining down on me for up to 16 hours a day. The noise from the machines was deafening and the pace we had to work at was almost inhuman. I lasted less than a year.
In college my job was to take every dusty dirty grimy book in a section of the library off its shelf and onto a book cart, then put it right back onto its shelf. I also added about 5 inches of free space to each shelf, so the last 5 inches of books got pushed onto the next shelf.
Even wearing a mask I got so much dirt up my nose that I’d sneeze pure black snot for days. Still, the really awful part of it was just how Sisyphean the whole task felt. I quit long before I was even close to finishing the section, so there wasn’t a hint of accomplishment to the work.
My first two and my last one. The first two were as a kid: one was working for a carpet cleaner and the other was in a car wash. They taught me what hard labor was like. The last one that finally convinced me to retire was as the quality control manager for a large project. The stress was a killer; after eight months I threw in the towel.
Video backup of commercials.
The post-prod studio I temped in had kept individual tapes of every last commercial they’d worked on since the mid-80s. That stock took a lot of shelf space by 2015. So they wisely reasoned that instead of having ~15,000 30 second tapes, why not have a couple dozen four or five hour long compilations ?
So that’s what I did for a couple months : move commercials from one tape to the other. But since those compilation tapes were to be used henceforth as reference material and possible sources for new shows (e.g. “the history of this or that brand”, “publicity throughout the ages” etc…) I had to make really doubly super duper sure the copy was pristine. Which means I had to watch every last commercial thrice : once during the copying process (which I couldn’t automate - I had to create pauses between videos, switch out the tapes etc…), a second time to make sure the copy was right with no sound drops or video artifacts or lost frames or whatever, and finally a third time when one compilation tape was full, partly to recheck for sound and artifacts and partly to record the precise timestamps of the videos for indexing purposes. Oh, and there were multiple copies of the same commercials, which still had to be copied and indexed separately because… I dunno, Reasons I guess ?
So that was me. Watching commercials for ~10 hours a day, every day of the week, for two months (with breaks when somebody else needed the studio or a more urgent task came up).
I swear to Me by day 3 I physically felt my brain getting stupider. By week 3 I was losing my goddamn mind.
Central Park fast food restaurant. It was little more than a closet but there were eight of us smashed together. My job was fries. Nothing but fries. It was fast paced and there was a lot of very hot grease. I lasted three hours. I didn’t even go back for my check.
It wasn’t so much the job as a specific task. When I was in high school, I went to work at my dad’s office as the weekend PBX operator and mail opener/sorter. In the summer, I was the junior grunt in the export department - running the mimeograph machine and the flex-o-writer (this was 1970/71/72) and doing whatever needed to be done at the grunt level - filing, answering phones…
The inactive file folders were kept in the basement, and as that room filled, the files needed to be boxed up and sent to the warehouse. BUT before they could be boxed, someone (boss’ daughter) had to verify that they were in numerical order and the boxes were properly labeled. The folders for the import department were cream with black print - easy on the eyes. The export folders were LIME GREEN with black print. On top of that, the room in the basement had no a/c or even a fan. It was in downtown Baltimore in the summer. There were windows at sidewalk level, and wouldn’t you know, just across the street was a fish market!! And the lighting in the basement was provided by individual bare bulbs.
Yep, that was a fun summer. All for $2.25/hr. Dirty, stinky, dark, tedious, exhausting. I was working with the son of the head of accounting - he was cute, but apparently not interested in me, so there wasn’t even the chance for smooching in the file room. By far, the nastiest thing I ever did for money. :eek:
I’d say that working at the animal hospital for one summer as a kennel attendent was the worse job. Even worse than working in fast food. I love dogs and cats very much, but menial labor is still menial labor. Poop and pee don’t start smelling like roses and clover just because it comes out of cute animals. And it’s poop and pee all day long. The animals were awesome though. Even the bitey, scratchy ones had my respect. It was like they were the prisoners that weren’t going to take shit from The Man.
But the people I could take or leave. The doctors were awful to us lowly attendants. All of them. The veterinarian assistants weren’t much better, though one of them was so wonderful that I would have taken a bullet for him. One of the kennel attendants had just gotten out of a prison and was always doing and saying inappropriate things. One day he stuck his hand in one of my pockets while I was giving a dog a bath and he stole my money. I got his crazy redneck ass fired, yes indeed. The groomer was a flamboyant man who was always fussing at me for not doing any thing with my hair. He didn’t even like animals, so it was clear to me he was a cosmetology school drop-out who had to take any job he could get.
I’ve worked at some pretty bad jobs, but I was so glad to get out of that place once the summer was over.
Nothing like others have said.
But…
An odd one. Hand painting geologic maps. Ink on linen. One map could take 1-2 weeks to finish. It was literally paint by number. 00 brushes. On a good day, you might paint 8 or 10 square inches. All. Day. Long. My mind is still a bit numb from that.
Today, I can spit that whole map out on a plotter in about 2 minutes.
Message board mod. The pay sucks and the customers are mean.
Or father of two teenage girls. Same reasons.
Before finding my present job, I worked in the offal (organ meat) section of a slaughter house running the tongue saw. I stood in ankle deep near freezing water at a band saw cuttiing the throat meet off of beef tongues. That was 36 years ago,
I owned a maintenance company, I worked from 5AM to 11PM 365 days a year.
Grinding the rough edges off of cultured marble sinks fresh out of the molds. The smell of the plastic dust was too much for me by the second day.
I’ve got a couple of those, myself. Worse than low paying; expensive.
I was teaching my oldest to drive a couple days ago and she did a fine job driving to our community park and back. My youngest was jealous and asked if she could drive, too. We live on a cul-de-sac and it was car-free at the time, so I thought what the heck. She did a fine job rounding the sac then turning slowly into our driveway. Just as I congratulated her she sped up and crashed deeply into the garage door. The garage door installer is coming out tomorrow. It ain’t gonna be cheap.
Back in my school days, I held a large variety of summer jobs, some good; most bad:
Most grueling job: heavy packer at a book publishing warehouse. Lifting stacks of books, boxing them and stacking the boxes on wooden pallets to be fork-lifted in a sweltering hot warehouse was good exercise, but very draining.
Most tedious job: line worker at 55-gallon steel drum manufacturing company. I’d spend all day doing one simple task: one day screwing the small caps into the drum lids, another day unloading the drums from the conveyor belt, etc. It was a fast belt, too.
It was mind-numbing. I got through it reminding myself it was only for 3 months. I couldn’t feel sorry for myself when I saw the guy on the other side of the plant—the cardboard drum side. His one and only job was to run a steam iron up the seam of the cardboard drums as they sped by on the belt. I asked about him and was told he’d being doing that same job for over 30 years.
Stupidest job: One summer I worked for a temp agency and a large company hired 3 of us for two weeks to help them move into a new facility across town. The only problem was, by the time we got there, there was nothing of value left to move. All the heavy moving was done by professional movers the week before we arrived.
The supervisor didn’t want us to just sit on our butts for two weeks so every morning he’d walk us around, room to room, until he found some type of busy work for us to do. But, they were ridiculous chores that didn’t need to be done, like moving boxes of junk from one side of the room to the other. One day we spent 8 hours just putting odds and ends into small plastic bags. *“Alright guys, scan all the shelves and floor and put all the paperclips you find into one bag; all the screws you find into another bag…all the nails in another, etc.” *I’m pretty certain all the bags just went into the trash bin at the end of our shift.
The funny thing about that company, however, was that everyone I met who worked there was super tall. At 6’3”, I’m no shorty, but I had to look up at all the guys and some of the girls at that place. The company manufactured nutritional drinks, maybe that had something to do with it.
Most unusual job (but one of my favorites): I worked on a special project at a Suzuki Motorcycle manufacturing plant. The job was to convert surplus 1975 Suzuki RE5’s into 1976 RE5’s. We were told not to talk about it because they didn’t want word to get out that they were simply converting last year’s model into this year’s model.
Me and a real nutjob from California were hired to be assistants to the mechanics. The 9 mechanics were flown over from Japan specifically for this project. Only one of them could speak very fractured English. They were all nice guys, and I kind of feel bad for some of the tricks we played on them.
One day, the fractured English mechanic told me they were going to Sears to buy some tools. He held up a hammer and asked, “how you say this?” The nutty Californian said, “that’s called a big f**ker.” The mechanics were very angry when they got back from Sears.
They were amazing mechanics, though. I had a Kawasaki Z-1 900 back then. One day they all surrounded my bike and hand motion asked if they could tinker with it. I agreed. I was alarmed when, after just a few minutes, my bike was torn down to bits and pieces on the floor and they were inspecting the pieces. Then, just as quickly, they put it all back together again—and tuned it nicely, too.
One of my college jobs. I worked in a die-casting plant that made the aluminum bases for bronzed baby shoes. At first I was responsible for clean-up: sweeping up all the scrap pieces of aluminum, hosing them off, and dumping them into vats of molten aluminum. The pieces were razor-sharp, and cut through the skin when barely touched. Then I was promoted to actually operating the machine that forced the molten aluminum into the dies, and deposited the white-hot items onto a trolley. Burns happened every day. One of my coworkers got shot in the back by a stream of molten metal. When I left the job, he was still in the hospital. Another woman lost two of her fingers. The plant had all sorts of safety violations, like flammable grease all over the floor, along side open flames. I guess the owners paid off any inspectors. The bathrooms were beyond filthy.
Toothy Blow.
brought hale bales in from the field and stacked in the barn at a rate of a nickle for three bales
↑ ↑ ↑ Bawahahahaha
I worked in a plastic factory. The first year I was there I worked on a press. Eight hours of standing in one spot pulling hot plastic pieces off a mold and stacking them in boxes.
The second year I was there, I got moved to the warehouse, which was much better.